iflix rolls out sachet pricing with Fortumo's Hosted DCB

Southeast Asia’s leading entertainment service, iflix, and the mobile technology company Fortumo have launched Fortumo’s Hosted DCB to enable all iflix customers in Indonesia, the Philippines, Myanmar, Thailand and Pakistan to pay for iflixVIP through their mobile operator.

In addition to the existing monthly and annual subscriptions to iflixVIP, customers can now experience iflix's premium service through a recurring sachet subscriptions, offering customers greater flexibility and convenience.

The wide availability of carrier billing (any prepaid or postpaid mobile customer can make payments) combined with new sachet pricing will help iflix reach a wider consumer audience.

Kjetil Rohde Jakobsen, iflix Global Director of Expansion, said, “In many of our markets, direct carrier billing is often the only payment instrument available to our users to pay for online content. With a vast majority of telco customers in these markets being prepaid customers with low average balance, it is crucial for iflix to be able to offer price points low enough to ensure people can pay.’

‘Launching Fortumo HDCB was a no-brainer for us. Fortumo were already live with the capabilities we were looking for with a large number of operators across all our core markets. This meant we could effectively deliver the capabilities we intended more than 10 times faster than if we had to do each integration directly with the operators,” he added.

“Emerging markets are today seeing the biggest growth in new digital consumers, which creates an exciting opportunity for merchants to grow their user base. To become successful in these markets, merchants need to account for local market specifics and consumer behavior. We are excited to be working with iflix, a leading player in the streaming space who understand their audience and has adapted a successful local strategy,” added Andrea Boetti, VP of Global Business Development at Fortumo.

In countries where iflix and Fortumo are working together, credit card penetration is less than 10% while the majority of consumers already own a smartphone. This means digital content merchants are unable to convert a large majority of their user base to paying customers, as most of them do not have access to traditional online payment methods.

Carrier billing resolves this issue by allowing anyone with a mobile device to pay through their mobile operator - either by deducting the charge from their prepaid SIM card balance or adding it to their monthly phone bill.

iflix uses Fortumo’s Hosted DCB product to collect payments from its customers. This gives iflix the capability to connect to telcos’ direct carrier billing infrastructure through one integration with Fortumo, while taking advantage of features including dynamic pricing and automated refunds. Meanwhile, Fortumo manages the consumer checkout experience and localization of the payment solution, making rolling out carrier billing scalable across a number of telcos and countries.

Fortumo’s platform is used by Google, Amazon, Spotify, Electronic Arts, Schibsted, OLX, EasyPark and thousands of other merchants. One integration with the platform enables merchants to collect payments from subscribers of more than 350 mobile operators.